Sunday, November 8, 2015

The Drama of Evolution

Kirsten Shepherd-Barr
offers a fascinating and sweeping study of the impact of evolutionary ideas on
the dramatic arts. She says that theatre and evolution ask similar questions
and have similar aims in terms of probing the nature of being human. She says
that the immediate directness of theatre and its emphasis on the action of
human form provide an apt venue for scientific ideas. Theatre especially has
the capacity to present history in real time. Shepherd-Barr says that the
purpose of her book is twofold: to enumerate references to evolution in the
playwrights under discussion and to examine how the writers engage, directly or
not, with evolutionary ideas.

Her book is not precisely
about any intersection between evolution and literary influence, and she
specifically criticizes literary Darwinism (which examines human behavior, principally
in its narrative form, in terms of evolved adaptations). Her concern is that
the literary Darwinists try to justify art by characterizing it as an evolved
behavior (and not as a byproduct of some other adaptation). Additionally, she
makes it clear that she will not address any How or Why questions concerning
the adaptive functions of the arts. Nor do we get, with all the emphasis on the
moving human body, any ideas concerning mirror or motor neurons or theory of
mind. This is not a book about the science of evolution. Rather, it is a demonstration
of how the arts borrow (and at times twist) scientific ideas.

Shepherd-Barr is skillful
in showing how playwrights actively employ, whether in agreement or not,
scientific ideas of their time. The
scope and depth of her dramatic knowledge is impressive, and while much
discussion of the plays can tend to summary rather than analysis, such
information is quite helpful. This book is not only beneficial to students and
scholars who study the interrelation of drama and science, but I’d venture to
say that the book could be quite useful to playwrights who are writing in this
area. From a historical perspective concerning modern drama, the book is
invaluable and provides a social history about how theatre gives voice to
evolutionary ideas of science, eugenics, male/female relationships and
marriage, women’s issues, sex and birth control, motherhood, and parenthood.

Shepherd-Barr declares that
in contrast to how a novelist (such as Thomas Hardy) can utilize the length of
a novel to unravel evolutionary ideas, the playwright has to use the human body
on stage as a symbolic text to address and question the audience. And this
stage-to-audience dialogue worked well for the Victorians, since they were
engaged with evolutionary ideas not only because of Charles Darwin (the
conversation started much earlier) but because of the popularizing (and
sometimes distortion) of Darwinian ideas by thinkers such as T.H. Huxley,
Herbert Spencer, and Ernst Haeckel. Shepherd-Barr’s understanding of evolutionary
ideas and processes, from Lamarck to Lyell through Haeckel, is sound. She does
an exceptional job explaining these often differing ideas concerning evolution
(as she has written other books on theatre and science). For instance, there is
Haeckel’s incorrect theory of recapitulation where the development of the
embryo mimics the evolutionary process. While this idea turns out to be bad
biology it works well on stage and was picked up by G.B. Shaw in Back to Methuselah. And that’s the point
she makes and the core around which she hovers in the book – not the question
of how perfectly imaginative writers understand evolutionary ideas but how
imaginative writers contextualize any of these ideas (accurately or not) in
their plays.

The Victorians were curious
people who valued spectacle as a means of learning, evidenced in the growth and
popularity of zoos, museums, lectures, and public experiments. There was a
sense of the theatrical in how knowledge is thus acquired, and the Victorians
were quite concerned with the implications of science, and especially evolution,
on the notion of the individual and the meaning of life. Shepherd-Barr offers a
thorough historical perspective with detail concerning Victorian attitudes,
values, and beliefs, particularly in how discoveries in the biological sciences,
geology, and anthropology filtered into the theatrical arts. For example, freak
shows became popular as do exhibits of indigenous people from far-off lands,
such as the Fuegians. Animals, too, became the subject of dramatic interest.
Shaw in Man and Superman
anthropomorphizes nonhuman creatures with human characteristics.

Likewise, there would be
elaborate shows such as Birds, Beasts and
Fishes (1854) where people mimic animals. In fact, in the nineteenth
century there are many instances of animals appearing on stage. One of Darwin’s
important books is The Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) which features strange and nearly
grotesque photographs of human faces. An actor such as Henry Irving in The Bells was expert in wild facial
expressions that denote atavism (54). In light of evolution, Shepherd-Barr
notes, many taboo subjects, such as sex, violence, and insanity are open to
public discussion. At the same time, any survey of the scientific literature of
the time will demonstrate that some thinkers questioned any aspects of
evolution or simply misunderstood the processes of evolution.

Early attempts to integrate
evolutionary ideas in drama examined how the natural environment offstage would
impact the human action on stage. Examples of this, notes Shepherd-Barr can be
seen in James A. Herne who was influenced by Henrik Ibsen where there is,
echoing Darwin, a struggle for existence. One needs to adapt to his or her
environment. The American realist, Hamlin Garland, like Herne, was familiar
with evolutionary ideas, mostly via Herbert Spencer, and also demonstrated how
the environment could determine aspects of an individual’s life.

Spencer popularized though often
distorted Darwin’s ideas. It was Spencer who coined the expression “survival of
the fittest.” Fitness, as a biological term, can be ambiguous. Traits and
characteristics enhance fitness; the traits that contribute to better survival
and reproduction survive. Spencer also promulgated a quasi teleological vision
of evolution. He imagined that, especially for human beings, we are evolving up
a ladder of progress. Nothing could be further from biological truth. Spencer
is responsible for firing up the public imagination and dramatic writing in
terms of eugenics and so-called social Darwinism. Henry Arthur Jones actually
referred to Spencer in plays, but Shepherd-Barr notes that the Lord Chamberlain
(i.e., licensor/censor) removed any such references, though the published
version includes them.

Shepherd-Barr underscores
how the reality of extinction fascinated Victorians and playwrights. Of course
extinction had been known and talked about long before, but after Darwin there
was a human connection. Dramatists symbolically built off what Victorians would
have witnessed in museum fossil exhibits – the termination of a family line or
a whole class of people, such as aristocrats. Moreover, another popularizer of
Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, vexed Victorians with the question of where
morality would fit into the picture of evolution. Huxley too misrepresents
Darwin, claiming that there is progress in human morality.

Fundamental to evolution by
natural selection are random variations, adaptations, and inheritance. To see
moral progress in humanity is akin to Spencer’s eugenics. In line with Steven
Pinker, to be more precise, societies can improve and individuals can exercise
more care, concern, and self-control. But the elements of morality, still
evident in our living, non-human primate cousins (viz work by Frans de Waal) do
not progress teleologically. They can only evolve according to selection
pressures. Certainly cultural evolution has an enormous impact on human behavior.
Shepherd-Barr is familiar with all of these applications and explains them
well. In chapter two, she presents an excellent discussion of acting/emotions
and psychological realism in light of Darwin’s Expression of Emotions. George Henry Lewes, commenting on actors,
says that rather than a more traditional, stylized acting, one needs to act
naturally so as to capture nature. This would be, as Shepherd-Barr suggests,
especially epitomized in a woman like the actress Eleonora Duse. The human body
and especially the face is a container of primitive emotions. Rather than a
grand gesture there would be emphasis on individual body parts and movements.

After the opening,
introductory chapters, Shepherd-Barr begins to focus on specific playwrights.
For chapter three, it is Ibsen, who touches on breeding, sexual selection,
heredity and women, and adaptation. Beyond exploring evolutionary themes,
Shepherd-Barr is good at discussing theatrical elements, dramaturgy, and
staging. In order to show how evolutionary elements, sometimes perverted, end
up in plays, she need to rely on plot summary. In an 1887 speech Ibsen
essentially declares himself a Darwinist; but there are other ideas mixed in
the speech, such as synthesis, which is not Darwinian since natural selection
culls out. Shepherd-Barr’s repeated
point is that many of the playwrights, because their work is an artistic
representation of reality, will take ideas from science and manipulate them in
new ways. In other words, writers who work within the span of staging action
within a few hours mainly look to the “broader implications” of Darwinian
thought and not minute, biological details (71).

Shepherd-Barr credits Ross
Shideler with noting how August Strindberg and Ibsen question patriarchy and
the family so that there is a Darwinian struggle for existence seen in social,
familial, and especially spousal conflicts. Men as much as women struggle
against traditional roles; women often reject a weak husband (68-69). In spite
of his emphasis on families and close human interactions, there are many
references in Ibsen to laws of nature. In fact, Shepherd-Barr says that long
before Richard Dawkins’ notion of the meme, Ibsen clearly hints at the power of
ideas to thrive, spread, or die. It is not clear how much or how carefully
Ibsen read Darwin. Ideas might have come from other sources, and Ibsen might
have been more influenced by Haeckel. At any rate, early plays such as Ghosts and The Lady of the Sea seem to express some Darwinian ideas such as
origin and descent and our compelling connection to the sea (77). Ibsen seems turned against any notion of human
progress and sees, rather, hereditary degeneration and extinction as more
likely. Similarly, eugenics, says Shepherd-Barr, comes up in Doll’s House and Enemy of the People. But Ibsen’s engagement with these ideas from
Galton might be satirical. Or he is simply engaging with the ideas of the
times, such as so-called social Darwinism.

In chapter four
Shepherd-Barr notes how many plays at the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth century address gender issues, especially the
supposed call to motherhood. What is a woman’s role in life, in marriage, in
society? Is motherhood “inevitable” for the progression of the species (92)?
Theatre became a battleground of ideas related to the women’s movement, gender
biology, male/female parenting, and male/female socialization and education.
Near the end of The Descent of Man, according
to Shepherd-Barr, Darwin suggests an essential mental difference between men
and women, and surely this is the conventional and popular perception. Some
Feminist thinkers, however, seized on Darwin’s notion of evolutionary change
and how woman are adaptable; i.e., how women need not only be made for
motherhood according to nature (95).

Shepherd-Barr then goes off
on a long but interesting tangent about James A. Herne’s Margaret Fleming, perhaps the only play to stage breast feeding.
The big question for the Victorians was how breast feeding, so motherly, could
also be so atavistic. The Victorians were overly concerned with regression, the
pulling away from their civilization to the primitive, and any instincts
portrayed in women heightened those fears. Shepherd-Barr explains how by 1879
babies were pretty much outlawed on the U.S. stage. Glass milk bottles with
rubber nipples were manufactured mid nineteenth century, with milk
sterilization later on, so people might have been surprised by breast feeding.
Of course there would be class issues as well. Families and women of means
would use wet nurses. The play hits directly the question of motherhood and
especially for women any “instinctual, biologically driven behavior”
(113). In later Victorian times women would
be criticized for neglecting the family and motherhood if they chose to work.
(See for instance George Gissing’s novel, The
Odd Women.)

Yet, as Margaret Fleming demonstrates, women are
criticized because of their devotion to their children. Margaret Fleming nurses
at the opening of the play her own child; later, she nurses the bastard baby of
a dying, poor woman with whom her husband had an affair. Margaret is clearly
middle class, so there is a question about “what is natural” for a mother
(120). Popular Victorian culture showed indigenous people naked, with women
bare-breasted near children, suggesting for Europeans something savage in their
own, natural tendencies. So there are very complex emotions concerning
motherhood in breast feeding, which becomes sanitized and less prevalent with
advances in science and technology.

In chapter five Shepherd-Barr
says that Strindberg’s interest in evolution and science influenced later
playwrights from George Bernard Shaw to Susan Glaspell. Contrary to Ibsen,
Strindberg’s evolutionary interest was more academic and Darwinian; however, as
a creative writer he was also captivated by Haeckel’s mysticism (128).
Strindberg went through several phases. In the 1880s he was naturalistic and
fashioned characters according to survival. See, e.g., Miss Julie. Then there was an “inferno phase” from about 1892-98
where emphasis was placed on the importance of science. By 1907 Strindberg is
religious and rejects evolutionary thinking with an unfounded fear of
regression since he was under the mistaken notion that human beings descended
directly from apes. In contrast to Strindberg and Shaw who skirt with
Intelligent Design, Ibsen did not see any agency in nature. At the same time,
says Shepherd-Barr, it is Anton Chekov who completely and unequivocally
embraces the science of evolution.

In spite of his
intellectual affinity to Ibsen, Shaw, from his preface to Back to Methuselah, opposed the science of natural selection,
viewed it as inhumane, and accused
Darwin of presenting life as random and sporadic. Shepherd-Barr emphasizes how
Shaw is, however, not a determinist. For Shaw, it is the power of the human
will (from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) that is paramount, as in Man and Superman. Shaw’s worldview,
embracing Lamarck and Spencer, was more self-organizing – which is contrary to
evolution by natural selection with its reliance on random variation. Shaw did,
however, prefer sexual selection since it affords a sense of agency. In this
way Shaw is a Lamarckian where acquired characteristics are inherited or not by
use and disuse. Biologically this is not possible, because then there would be
a blending of traits, and ultimately there would be a continuum of only a few
traits and no spectrum.

But as Shepherd-Barr points
out, in discussing Shaw and feminism, nothing can take away from Shaw’s comic
genius or the fact that he engages in vital moral questions (though, like many
of his day, on the wrong side of science). By the end of Man and Superman, Shaw rejects the Victorian idea (perhaps from
Spencer) of a woman marrying a man to ennoble him.

Compared with the
Victorians, the Edwardians are even more concerned about inheritance and try to
find genetics as “malleable and mutable rather than fixed” (156). Perhaps this
explains Virginia Woolf’s famous statement that character changed somewhere
around 1910. Not coincidental to an almost negative obsession about inheriting
bad characteristics, eugenics peaks in 1918 with Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Freaks, which postulates a question
about how we can alter human genes. With a focus on aristocrats and “freaks” on
stage, Pinero used real-life giants, contortionists, and diminutive people,
related in some way to the devastation of WWI and how human actions can change
humanity (157). Shepherd-Barr tells us that The
Freaks is eugenic since the naturally distorted people (as opposed to war
victims) are not allowed to marry.

Chapter six deals with
issues of reproduction. For instance, around 1904 there are concerns from women
about how much childbirth they should endure, and this unease plays out on
stage. In fact, Shepherd-Barr asserts that sex and reproduction are, across
theatrical history, prime subjects. She provides many examples from Ibsen to
Shaw and notes how in 1922 Eugene O’Neill’s First
Man featured the offstage screams of a woman dying in childbirth. There
were no scenes of childbirth on any stage. By 1918, from the aftermath of WWI,
a play such as Maternity by Eugene
Brieux was not licensed since the English wanted to focus on repopulation
(169). Only by the 1930s were hospital births more usual. For the Victorians
and Edwardians, Shepherd-Barr reminds us, husbands were often present during
childbirth since there was often a chance of maternal death.

Shepherd-Barr notes how
some plays, with an emphasis on women’s concerns, mark a sharp distinction
between marriage and motherhood. There of course was sex outside of wedlock,
and this could be referred to theatrically. Sexual selection according to
Darwin is dramatic by virtue of the male antics, colors, songs, and displays. But
consider the patriarchal Victorian/Edwardian positon concerning all of this.
They were immensely repelled by Darwin’s notion that sexual selection is the
result of female choice. There are, then, many attacks on traditional notions
of marriage in the early twentieth century, such as Shaw’s Misalliance or H.M. Harwood’s Supplanters.
From 1904 onward with more women in the workforce, there was open-minded
thinking about premarital and extramarital sex. Shepherd-Barr recounts how
Darwin, in The Descent of Man,
discusses male and female individuals who mate and then depart, a random act
after a female choice.

Certainly, in the context
of reproduction, eugenics comes up again, says Shepherd-Barr. Take for instance
the play by Elizabeth Robins, Alan’s Wife,
which includes infanticide by a woman consumed not by motherhood but by her
marriage. Contraception and abortion, topics that came into direct conflict
with the censors, were also subjects of plays. For example, Susan Glaspell in Chains of Dew argued to legalize
contraception, and Harley Granville-Barker in Waste tackles illegal abortion that leads to death. In 1907 Edward
Garnett’s The Breaking Point, which
argued for easier abortions, was banned. These subjects are relevant to
evolution since they touch on female sexual desire and choice. We see this
especially in Votes for Women! By Elizabeth
Robins where the female character acknowledges her physical needs that lead to
her pregnancy and abortion. Of course there is Eugene O’Neill’s 1914 one-act
play, Abortion, where the woman never
appears since she’s dead from a botched abortion before the action of the play.
The play is about the upper class young man who faces status disgrace from his
family and subsequently commits suicide.

In chapter seven
Shepherd-Barr focuses on Susan Glaspell and Thornton Wilder. Glaspell engages
with biology and evolutionary thinking but does not evince a deep or complete
understanding. She mixes and matches, according to Shepherd-Barr, elements of
Lamarck, Spencer, and Darwin. In plays such as The Verge and Inheritors
there is a preference for a type of punctuated leap, saltation, rather than the
gradualism of natural selection. This is a dramatic device that permits for the
sudden development of an individual. A more serious poetic liberty is
Glaspell’s leaning toward “human destiny” (205). There is no destiny in the
natural world, only cause and effect. From about 1909-10 Glaspell worked for
the U.S. Forest Service and so we can see “the unspoiled earth throughout her
work...” in different and at times incompatible environments, such as the edge
between sea and forest (208).

Shepherd-Barr says
Glaspell’s liberties and focus on physical nature enable her to create
metaphors of humanity. In Close the Book
from 1917 Glaspell suggests that the strength of the future of a family line is
not in purity but in the blending of new blood. Glaspell sees agency in nature
and expresses a creative evolution leading to human perfection, as in The Verge (210). Glaspell tries to
encompass ideas about evolution through the individual, how a single person’s conversion
can represent the much larger social or environmental change (220). In The Verge we have a woman scientist who
rejects her proscribed social and professional roles; there is mutation theory
of plants as a metaphor of women’s issues (211).

Thornton Wilder seems to
accept Darwinism in The Skin of Our Teeth,
but at the same time, like Shaw, his idealism forces him to reject the random
blindness of natural forces. In Skin of
Our Teeth, says Shepherd-Barr, there is an “almost mystical invocation of
women...” as pivotal to human evolution, hearkening back to Ibsen seeing women
as the salvation of the human race. This is “progressive” thinking that runs
counter to the “ambivalence” we find in Robins and Glaspell (229). On the other
hand we have Eugene O’Neill’s anthropological The Hairy Ape about a coal stoker in a ship’s engine room. He is dark
and muscular with strong arms. By the end of the play he is killed by a
gorilla. The play touches on life’s origins and how atavism lingers in more
advanced civilization (232).

In her final chapter
Shepherd-Barr discusses Samuel Beckett, whose highlights how human beings in
their misdirected concerns about god (as in Waiting
for Godot) have become alienated from the natural world. Like the other
playwrights Shepherd-Barr discusses, Beckett also does not report evolutionary
science; instead, he takes what he needs and fashions those ideas to line up to
his own. We don’t know how much of Darwin Beckett read, though he does quote
Darwin’s Origin of Species in his
notebooks and in a letter writes dismissively of Darwin (244). Similar to
Wilder in The Skin of Our Teeth and
J.B. Priestly in Summer Day’s Dream,
Beckett’s Happy Days provides a
scathing assessment of environmental devastation dramatizing how we are
destroying the planet.

Clearly Beckett echoes
Darwin’s geological concerns, Shepherd-Barr stresses. As with Darwin, Beckett
emphasizes variation, not fixity; see, e.g., how the tree in Godot changes during the course of the
play. In All That Fall Beckett
touches on reproduction, hysterectomy, menopause, and abortion. In Breath we witness an entire life in a
matter of seconds. In Rough for Theatre I
and Endgame there is a sense of human
end-time and the destruction of earth or human extinction and universal entropy
(253). As Shepherd-Barr says, Beckett is “a dramatist of the end of nature, of
our great alienation from our natural surroundings...” (254). He embraces
primitive characters, their biological needs, and even “anti-creation” (267).

In her epilogue,
Shepherd-Barr mentions some contemporary playwrights who also deal with
retro-Victorian themes of genetics, eugenics, reproduction, and climate change.
The difference with contemporary productions is that they implicate the
audience in our evolutionary concerns and environmental problems. I’d venture
to say that the contemporaries might try to be more true to the science. But we
cannot expect a playwright to offer a scientific paper; the wisdom and
entertainment of drama is in how ideas from the scientific community are reinvented
on stage.